Quarkcoin is an open source blockchain based digital currency. It is considered hard to mine and secure. It is also considered to be easier and faster to transfer than Bitcoin.

With a blocktime speed of just 30 seconds and a transaction confirm time of just three minutes (6 blocks), Quark is fast for transactions. Transactions take only three minutes to confirm. QRK is also built to be secure. It requires rounds of hashing using six different hashing functions to decrease the likelihood of hacking.

Quark is still ideal for GPU mining, there is no ASIC miner on the market. Quark coins are traded for Bitcoin on digital currency exchanges and has an growing community. Several forums are dedicated to Quark. Since there is a short term for mining the majority of the 247 million coins have been mined.

Quark has a atypical feature – inflation is built into the coin. There will never be less than a one QRK reward per block, amounting to an annual increase of one million QRK, or a yearly inflation of 0.5 percent.

Two features make Quark easier to use as a currency than Bitcoin. First is the larger amount of coin that will be placed in circulation – 247 million (plus an additional one million per year) compared to only 21 million ever for Bitcoin. This makes it possible to deal in larger units of currency. Coins like Quark, Infinitecoin and Colossuscoin are competing for this small transaction’ space. Also the annual inflation rate provides an additional motivation to use Quarks for transactions instead of just hold or speculate on them as assets. You can learn more about Quark coins on the official Quarkcoin website.

What is an Altcoin

An Altcoin is basically any ecoin that is not a Bitcoin or (increasingly) a litecoin. There are over 60 Altcoins currently being mined and/or exchanged online. Recently some of these Altcoins have had amazing appreciations. One Ecoin called Sexcoin (SXC) recently shot up over 1000%. Quarkcoin, Infinitecoin and Goldcoin are three coins that have also recently shot up in value. To get an idea of how an altcoin might grow, start with how they are born.

How an Altcoin/Ecoin gets started

A developer or small group of developers will design and build the new Ecoin (Altcoin) and announced it in a forum. The announcement will include a description of the Ecoin, the rules for mining, receiving and sending the coin, the coin wallet and the source code. After the announcement, Ecoin miners will decide to mine for the new Ecoin or not. If the Ecoin starts to get mined, the miners will start to exchange the new ecoin for established Ecoins like Bitcoin or Litecoin within their communities.

If there is enough interest in the new Ecoin, one or more of the Ecoin exchanges will add the new coin to their exchange list. After the Ecoin is added to an exchange, anyone with an account in the exchange and Ecoins to trade, can acquire the new coin through their online account. Once a coin has a place on the exchange it can grow or perish on its own merits.

Why some Alt coins take off

The Ecoin market is still very small. Because it is small big buyers and seller tend to have more influence than in larger markets. This seems especially true for new coin markets. Right now a lot of the Ecoin wealth is concentrated in a few holders or groups of holders. Most of this wealth was accumulated by mining or buying Bitcoins early on. Alt coins are extremely helpful for these buyers to diversify their holding and as opportunities to get big ROI on very inexpensive coins. For example, if Bitcoins cost $1000, a 100% appreciation makes the value of Bitcoin $2000. Where as if you can trade 1 Bitcoin for 10,000,000 Altcoins, the Altcoin only needs to go from a value of 1/10 of a penny to 1/5 of a penny for that same appreciation. This type of appreciation and even much higher appreciation of 1000% or more seems to be happening in the Alt coin market quickly.

What Alt coins to get NOW

Alt coins seem to follow growth pattern. Typically there is an immediate spike in mining activity and then either a gradual climb or drop off. Once a new coin is listed on an exchange the coin typically spikes in interest and then drops. After that the coin typically bounces around or remains very flat. Coins that remain very flat stay flat until they slowly perish or spike up. Getting altcoins during the flat or in the beginning of a spike may work.

If you own Bitcoins or Lite coins, you can trade for Alt coins in exchanges. You can not typically purchase Alt coins for cash. You can get the Ecoin Club Altcoin Super Pac which includes:

Worldcoin: WDC is traded for BTC, margins are high right now in secondary markets which could signal a steep upward climb soon.

Zetacoin: ZET is traded for BTC, margins are high right now in secondary markets which could signal a steep upward climb soon, also ZET has had a slow and stable climb.

Casinocoin: CSC is traded for BTC. There is a good amount of chatter on trading board about CSC and the name of the coin could help it gain good adoption for online gambling.

Centcoin: CET is traded for LTC. The good news is also the bad news once it was worth more, now it is worth less. This is the case of getting a coin when it is down and it can not go down much more.

Netcoin: NET is traded for LTC. Netcoin is at a high right now, but there is strong chatter about this coin in the Ecoin community.

If you are interested in getting the Ecoin Club Altcoin pac, please submit your email and we will reply with additional information.

These ecoins are great for smaller transactions

Quark (QRK) recently increased in value over 500% in one week.

Bitcoins are great, but they are not great for all transactions. Right now, Bitcoin processing is relatively expensive. This is on purpose to discourage Bit coin network spamming and reward BTC payment processing. The transaction fee for BTC is currently .0001 BTC, at BTC $1000 that is $.10.

Goldcoins are up almost 100% in the last week

There is an opportunity for other coins with large volumes and small transaction fees to grab a piece of the ecoin marketplace. Three of the top contenders appear to be Infinitecoin, Goldcoin and Quarkcoin. These 3 ecoins are showing resilience on the market and have relatively strong communities behind them.

Infintecoins recently doubled in value vs BTC

Ecoin Club’s 3 Coin Super Pac is the best way to get all three of these Ecoins at once. The 3 Ecoin Super Pac includes 10,000 Infinitecoins, 5 Goldcoins and 5 Quarkcoins. Supplies are limited and offer may be discontinued due to volatility and demand.

Order Now for $15 with Paypal

After you order, you will need to send us your Infinitecoin, Goldcoin and Quarkcoin address. We will help you set up your wallets if needed. Once your wallets are synced and/or active, you can expect your Ecoins in under 24 hours.

Infinitecoin (IFC) is an open network, peer-to-peer ecoin similar to Litecoin. However, IFC has 1142.86 times as many coins as Litecoin. Infinitecoin is considered the penny of ecoins. Infinitecoin and Litecoin use scrypt hash function for proof-of-work. This is different from Bitcoins which use another function called SHA-256. Also, the Infinitecoin network adjusts mining difficulty every hour. For Bitcoins and Litecoins mining difficulty remains the same for longer periods of time then changes rapidly. This means that it is already very difficult to mine for Infinitecoins.

Infinite coins could have a strong future.

* Almost all Infinite Coins have already be ‘mined’. It is very difficult to get Infinite coins by mining. You pretty much have to buy them on the open market. This makes Infinitecoins harder to acquire and rare compared to other Ecoins like Bitcoins and Litecoins.

* Infinitecoins are used to buy small items (this is why they are sold in large numbers like 1,000,000). If more people start using Infinite Coins (IFC) for small purchases, demand could skyrocket.

* In the future, it is possible that Infinitecoins could become the NUMBER ONE Ecoin for small purchases in stores ( a few dollars). This is potentially a HUGE global market.

* The Infiintecoin market is volatile. Currently large price swings are common.

* Getting in early on Inifinite coins could be a great thing to do!

What you do with Inifinitecoins

Infinitecoins are exchangeable for other Ecoins like Bitcoins and Litecoins. There are many ecoin markets that exchange infinitecoins for other ecoins. If you want to send someone a small amount of ecoins, Infinitecoins may be the best way to do it. While transferring Litecoins and Bitcoins is relatively inexpensive, transferring Infinitecoins is basically free. This is a real value and the markets have demonstrated this by pushing up its value in Bitcoins and Litecoins.

How to get Infinitecoins

The first thing you need is an Infinitecoin specific wallet. You can download or update your IFC wallet from the Infinitecoin website for the desktop version. Most online wallets are connected to ecoin exchanges. As of now most of those exchanges only allow intra-ecoin trading rather than USD or EUR to ecoin trading.

The Bitcoin market is highly volatile. Bitcoin prices often swing by 50% or more. Now you can act like a big bank and buy and sell Bitcoin derivatives to help manage your risk. Unfortunately you will have to gamble your OWN money instead of your depositors. Also there is probably no government willing to bail you out and no case for ‘to big to fail’ if you lose your bet.

Derivatives are designed to help you manage your risk. You can manage your risk in Ecoins (virtual currency) by buying Bitcoin options that leveraged your dollars and offset the risk of Bitcoin prices going the opposite way that you predict. For example if you are holding Bitcoins (long position), you might want to bet (buy options) that Bitcoins are going to go down in price. This will mean that you ‘lose’ less if prices go down.

If you are holding cash instead of Bitcoins (short position), you think that Bitcoin prices are going to go down. In this case, you can buy options that prices will go up. This will offset some of your losses if prices do go up and you are sitting on cash. Dublin based Predictious recently launched Bitcoin option spreads which offers both long- and short-positions. It works about the same as typical option spread markets. You pay a fixed price for a fixed reward if you ‘bet’ correctly.

For example, you can bet on the future price of Bitcoin at a set day and time. For example, in the picture above, if you think that Bitcoins will be priced at or above $1400 on Jan 1, 2014 (Dublin time) you can “buy” the contract at $3.49 and get paid $10 if you are correct. If you believe it will not reach $1400, you “sell” the contract at $0.55 and get $10 if you are correct.

This afternoon my 5 year old daughter asked me “what is a Bitcoin”? I replied that it is a prize you get when your computer solves a math problem. At its core a computer is factoring to get a Bitcoin. Factoring is figuring out all the combinations of numbers that equal another number via multiplication. For example the factors of 4 are 2×2, and 4×1. So we played a game.

The game is kind of like math Jeopardy. Since she is just in kindergarten we used addition instead of multiplication. Instead of asking her what is 3+2, i told her I would give her the math answer and she would have to tell me all the addition and subtraction sets that equal 5 for all whole numbers between 0 and 10. To mine bitcoins, your computer is factoring numbers as big as 4000 digits or more.

Since she is just in kindergarten, we kept the math problems to just addition and subtraction between 0 and 10. The first answer that I gave her was 5. I asked her to start telling me the combinations of addition and subtraction between 0 and 10 that equal 5. First she asked me if it was 4 +1. I told her that yes that does equal 5, but that was not the answer that I was looking for. She continued to give me answers. 3+2, 5+0, 6-1, 7-2, etc. Eventually she got the correct answer 9-4.

When she got the correct answer I awarded her a Bitcoin which she promptly traded for two carrot sticks. The next time she solved it she exchanged her Bitcoin for 3 carrot sticks. The next time I told her that her Bitcoin was only worth one carrot stick and asked her if she wanted one carrot now or would rather wait until the next one she solved and find out I’d she could get more carrots then. She took the one carrot. Appreciation might be a lesson for another day.

Ecoins are not the same thing as gold, silver, tulips or other investments. There is something real and extra with ecoins. When you buy ecoins you also buy the vault to store the ecoins and the tool to send or receive the ecoin. For all other types of currency and investments you need to buy those two items separately. In a sense a dollar worth of ecoin is always worth more than a dollar worth of other currency or commodity because ecoins come with the vault and the transfer system. When you buy securities or other currencies there are additional costs associated with hold the items and transferring the items. The transaction fees for ecoins are low and will probably only get lower over time as the ‘processing’ task becomes more widely distributed.

One way to think of Bitcoins is as the fastest growing money transfer product in history. It is an open source project like Linux, wordpress, Andriod and a bunch of other names you know. The only way to ‘buy’ a piece of those movements is to create a company and service layer product utilizing the open source project. However since all ecoins trade against fiat currency or other ecoins, when you buy an ecoin you are buying a piece of the Bitcoin movement (or company if you prefer). Buying Bitcoins is sort of like buying stock in Bitcoin.

Is there an intrinsic value to ecoins?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the underlying value of Bitcoins and ecoins. People are comparing them to tulips and other famous bubbles from days past. Is there an intrinsic value to ecoins? Ecoins are not the same thing as gold, silver, tulips or other investments. There is something real and extra with ecoins.

What are you really buying when you buy Bitcoins?

When you buy ecoins you also buy the vault to store the ecoins and the tool to send or receive the ecoin. For almost all other types of currency or investments you need to buy those two items separately. One way to think of Bitcoins is as the fastest growing money transfer product in history. It is an open source project like Linux, wordpress, Andriod and a bunch of other names you know. The only way to ‘buy’ a piece of those movements is to create a company and service layer product utilizing the open source project. However since all ecoins trade against fiat currency or other ecoins, when you buy an ecoin you are buying a piece of the Bitcoin movement (or company if you prefer).

Ecoins are more than ‘money’

Ecoins are more than money – they are also the way to hold and transfer the money. For almost all other types of currency, the user must engage a 3rd party or undertake additional work to get the money from A to B. With ecoins, the mechanism to hold and move the curency is completely married to the ecoin itself. This is because the ecoin is only held by wallets with access to the block chain and only transferred by updating the block chain. If you only think of ecoins as the fasting growing financial transaction start-up in the history of the world, what is its present day value?

Holding and transferring money is a BIG business

According to David Woo, Bank of America Merrill Lynch currency analyst if you compare Bitcoin to the three money largest money exchangers Western Union, MoneyGram, and Euronet you can get a good idea of real present day value.

Let’s assume that Bitcoin becomes one of the top three players in this industry. What does that mean for Bitcoin valuation? Given Bitcoin’s supply is fixed, when one buys a Bitcoin, one is acquiring not only a medium of exchange but also an investment in the enterprise value of Bitcoin. From this point of view, Bitcoin’s market capitalization could be viewed, with a little leap of faith, as its enterprise value. With the average market capitalization of Western Union, MoneyGram and Euronet at about $4.5bn, we will add this number to the maximum market capitalization of Bitcoin’s role as a medium of exchange.

Woo goes on to state that “Assuming Bitcoin becomes (1) a major player in both e- commerce and money transfer and (2) a significant store of value with a reputation close to silver, our fair value analysis implies a maximum market capitalization of Bitcoin of $15bn (1BTC = 1300 USD).”

When a computer is mining ecoins, it is factoring extremely large numbers in an effort to match an RSA like encryption. Ecoins are rewarded to a computer when the computer solves the encryption problem and proves it to the network. Recently software engineer and Founder’s Dojo member Raj Shah explained hashing and quantum security and its relationship to bitcoins.

Chinese banks can’t deal in ecoins

It is 2:30 am in California and the ecoin world is ablaze with recent news out of China that banks are banned from participating in ecoin transactions. According to a statement on the central bank’s website, banks can not give pricing in Bitcoin, buy, sell or insure Bitcoin. The immediate reaction from the market is panic. However the news out of China was not nearly as bad as it seems. It is actually unexpected good news.

Most banks can’t deal in ecoins

China is not the only country in the world to be restricting its financial institutions from participating in ecoins. Most banks are forbidden from investing in or buying/selling speculative, unregulated, anonymous transactions. Have you ever seen a Bitcoin option from your local bank? The Central Bank also said that individuals in China are free to buy, sell and hold ecoins as long as they take on the risk themselves.

This is great news for ecoins

Banking in China is not great, the banks pay almost no interest and the government has authority to take money out of banks. Ecoins represent a place to park wealth and transfer money in and out of the country. For the first time, the Chinese Government, through the Bank of China has nodded that its people can continue to buy, sell and trade ecoins. This is a pro individual freedom and pro ecoin position. Read more from Bloomberg News.

1) The Chinese government does not consider bitcoin to be a currency. This is very good news as it means that bitcoin is not subject to currency restrictions.

2) Financial institutions cannot offer services in bitcoin including deposits, clearing, and market making, nor can they do things like offer loans in bitcoin.

3) Bitcoin exchanges can operate as long as the abide by the provisions of the telecommunications regulations and abide by anti-money laundering rules. The telecom regulations are primarily censorship restrictions which are irrelevant for bitcoin exchanges. Bitcoin exchanges will be allowed to operate as long as they get the real identities of bitcoin users.